Sunday, March 30, 2014

- Reminder: lots of big events coming up in New York this week during Rare Book Week, including the sale at Sotheby's on Tuesday of the Indiana Historical Society's copies of Audubon's Birds and Quadrupeds.

- More books from the Mendham Collection will be sold at Sotheby's on 20 May as part of their Music & Continental Books & Manuscripts sale. These will include the first edition of Wyclif's works (Worms, 1525), as well as a unique Venetian incunable. As Clive Field remarked in a listserv post this week, "This year is therefore likely to see the complete dismemberment by the Law Society of one of the country's most important religious libraries formed in the nineteenth century, the cataloguing of which the British Library funded."

- In The Guardian, Robin Stummer reports on new graffiti found on the pillars of St Mary's church at Lidgate, Suffolk, which may include the carved "signature" of John Lydgate.

Joel Greenberg's A Feathered River Across the Sky (Bloomsbury, 2014) is not an easy book to read. There were times when I had to put it down for a little while in favor of something amusing, or just to go outside and listen to the birds sing. Greenberg's book is a heart-wrenching catalog of depredations committed by members of our own species against the passenger pigeon, ultimately resulting in the complete and utter extinction of a species once unrivaled in terms of visible presence on the landscape of much of what is now the United States.

This is not an easy book, but it is an excellent book. Greenberg has meticulously collected and collated accounts of passenger pigeon observations, both when the birds were plentiful and widespread, and when the species had been reduced to just a few individuals, eking out a miserable existence in zoo enclosures, being pelted with sand in an attempt to make them move about. He has brought together a vast array of information on the techniques used to collect, kill, and market these birds, and deploys it to great effect.

The scale and scope of the assault(s) on large nesting assemblages of passenger pigeons in the last third or so of the 19th century are outlined in painful detail, and if you can get through this book without tears welling up in your eyes at the wanton destruction, well, you've done something I couldn't manage. By the time anyone noticed and began to speak in favor of conservationist measures, it was too late, and then the dreadful cycle continued as collectors and scientists sought specimens of the species ... resulting in the hunting down of many remaining wild birds.

Greenberg has also worked diligently to recover accounts of the few captive passenger pigeons who lived slightly longer than their wild brethren, and his account of the life and death of Martha, the last living bird, who died in the Cincinnati Zoo on 1 September 1914, is a lovely tribute.

I'm afraid my notes on this book may make it seem maudlin, or overwrought, and it's not, in the slightest. Greenberg's done a great job of presenting the facts and telling the tales. But it is a sad book, and one that should be very widely read, as it provides a terribly important cautionary lesson. Nearly a hundred years have passed since Martha breathed her last, and while great strides in species protection have been made, there is a very long way to go. We are much the poorer, now, for the loss of this beautiful species that once darkened the continent's skies, as well as for the many others that share its fate. Would that no other book like Greenberg's ever has to be written, but alas that is not likely to be the case, and certainly won't be if we don't absorb its lessons.

- Endrina Tay has a great essay on the Jefferson quote "I cannot live without books" on the Monticello store blog.

- The Catholicon Anglicum, a 1483 Middle English-Latin dictionary, has been purchased by the British Library for £92,500. The UK government had barred the manuscript's export following its sale to an overseas buyer at auction.

- Two photographs may have been identified as from the New York City funeral procession for Abraham Lincoln, the WaPoreports. Key words "may have been," but the case seems fairly good.

Sunday, March 16, 2014

- NARA announced this week that its facility in Anchorage, AK will be closed, and "storefront" facilities in Philadelphia and Fort Worth will be consolidated into larger facilities nearby, for a savings of $1.3 million per year.

Sunday, March 09, 2014

- Another week, another absolutely astounding book theft story. A report by Kim Ring in the Worcester Telegram highlights the wet noodle of a sentence handed down to Joseph G. Heath of Leicester, MA, who pleaded to "sufficient facts for a guilty finding" in relation to the theft of more than 100 rare books from Becker College's Samuel May, Jr. collection (see this ABAA security blog post for more on the missing items). Heath, a janitor at the college with access to the library, had sold several of the stolen books to a Worcester bookstore, which in turn had tried to sell them to the Leicester Historical Society (this led to the original alert that the books may have been stolen from Becker). Heath also sold 24 books to a Boston bookshop $850, which have since been recovered, and attempted to sell others via Craigslist. Heath was arrested and charged in November 2012. Approximately fifty of the stolen books, worth around $15,000, plus one inscribed to (not by, as indicated in the article) Abraham Lincoln, have not yet been recovered.

Prosecutors had requested that Heath be ordered to pay $15,000 in restitution, but last week a judge ordered Heath to pay a measly $3,000 and sentenced him to three years' probation, which term could be reduced to one year if the restitution is paid. Utterly ridiculous.

- Over at Harper's, historian Mary Niall Mitchell writes on a particularly amazing copy of Solomon Northrup's Twelve Years a Slave.

- Eric Caren is planning to sell his collection of some 200,000 items en bloc in a private treaty sale.

- The British Library has acquired Philip the Good's manuscript of the Mystère de la Vengeance, one of the finest illuminated manuscripts of any medieval theatrical text. The manuscript was acquired by the British government in lieu of inheritance tax.

Reviews

- Marwa Elshakry's Reading Darwin in Arabic; review by Robert Irwin in the TLS.

About Me

Reviews of books old and new; news and commentary on book history, library culture, digital humanities, archives and related subjects. Written by Jeremy Dibbell, a bibliophile, haunter of used bookstores, and Director of Communications and Outreach for Rare Book School. Email: philobiblos@gmail.com.